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Releases / Re: [FF8PC-Steam] Ragnarok Rebalancing Mod (v1.2b & v1.1b)
« on: 2023-02-21 13:22:04 »This mod was a huge letdown. Easily the "worst" gameplay mod I played for a FF title (balance wise). It's not downright bad but it doesn't really fix vanilla game issues and adds a few more glaring balance problems.Seeing as I'm partially to blame for some of the changes & developments that this mod has seen over the years, I care about it a lot and reading through your post made me want to comment as there's a lot of valid points you're making that I happen to agree with, despite the clearly hyperbolic & frankly ridiculous assertions intermixed throughout.
First of all, character balance strictly speaking, well there is simply no balance at all. Zell is pure trash, Quistis / Selphie / are okayish. Irvine is trash early / mid (due to lack of STR / MAG, his SPD doesn't compensate due to how damage formula works in FF VIII) and good at late game if you make use of his limit break, I don't think he can reach 255 mag without stat farming and a single mag ability which also makes him inferior to other mages.Not off to a great start here - "no balance at all" followed by "most characters are okayish". Seems like the opposite of no balance, you'd kind of expect most characters in a challenging environment to be okay instead of skewing weak/strong. Zell is strong early on due to physicals being the primary method of punishment before getting access to better stuff, and overall he's a bit of a high skill floor & ceiling character with his limit break - with fast enough inputs, the damage potential is the highest of the bunch, as it should be. Irvine isn't a mage.
So I feel like it needs to be asked, did you playtest properly your mod or did you just test segments with artifically leveled characters ? Roughly during the whole game Rinoa (and Selphie to some extent) can keep up their MAG stat to close enough the same value Zell / Squall have in STR with proper junctions and upgraded weapons. Why does it matter ? Because under any circumstance an equal value in MAG to STR will make decent spells deal more damage than a normal attack. Which is hilarious with late game spells and various buffs.Now we're getting somewhere: the issue of magic being overpowered, or rather becoming OP through multicasting. I made a BIG stink of double & triple casting magic being consistently the optimal approach to pretty much any given fight a few pages back.
At 255 MAG a high tier spell (flare, meteor, ultima ; which are easy to farm since you can draw them from mobs in esthar excepted ultima you have to refine from a fixed encounter in esthar which is slightly more annoying but still pretty easy) will deal more damage than an attack with 255 STR. Except that well ... you can triple cast. Which means your mage now deals roughly 4 times the damage of your STR character. But it doesn't stop there. A single GF has auto haste and I haven't found a single source of Accelerator since card refining was also changed. There might be a convoluted way to farm it via mugging a vysage and refining lightweights excepted I couldn't get any vysage to spawn, all fights were hands only so idk. Which means you'll obviously set the auto haste on your mage which deepens the gap between a MAG and STR character even more. (Self casting haste is often a waste of time between slows / stops and missed damage opportunity + the oppression of some bosses).
My suggestion was always to severely limit how many Doubles and Triples you can get in the game. For instance for disc 1 I advocated for having a single-use draw point of Double, and no ways to get more. I believe the same should be done for Triple but for the entirety of the game - for instance, 1 draw point or a single-use item refine to get ~10 Triples and that's all you can get, ever.
Another "nerf" could be that Triple only lasts for a single spellcast, which would make it too inefficient to keep recasting Triple all the time so that would make it more of a precise tactical tool rather than a constant, default must-have status. Overall that would introduce some crucial decision making and circumvent the problem of triple casting magic being the optimal strategy for pretty much every fight in one fell swoop. And yes, some of the high level magics are way too easy to acquire as well.
In a vacuum, it's fine for high level magic to be stronger that a normal attack because if it wasn't, why would you ever use them? But there needs to be an actual cost to doing that, and right now, there really isn't any.
So what tools do STR characters have to compete with MAG ? Cheese strats with auras / crisis limit break which is stupid imo. The whole limit break system should be reworked but w/e I get it it's not easy and not the point of the mod. Though Zell limit break downright sucks compared to Squall / Irvine. So what's left ? Darkside ? Yeah it could be decent since it triples your attack damage. Except it was nerfed in several ways. It consumes 1/3 of your hp which is not a risk you want to take at any point due to boss patterns. The fact that almost every boss that isn't human can't be drained (thus you can't regen with drain linked to status attack with physical attacks) doesn't help darkside case. Second nerf is that there's only one GF that now learns it. Meaning your second STR character won't even that option.This is just nonsense. Limit breaks are a core feature and one of the game's main draws is that they're more of a consistent tool in the player's arsenal, adding a vital layer of character identity as well. You're free to not like that, but you don't get to fault the game, much less the mod, for your own weird predilections. There's nothing that qualifies them as "cheese". Zell's limit break, as stated earlier, has the highest damage potential, so you're just incorrect there.
As for Darkside, there needs to be an appropriate cost to using it, obviously. It can deal a metric ton of damage hitting an elemental weakness and its ease of use is tantalizing, so if it didn't drain a chunk of your health, it would become disproportionately effective.
There's literally no upside to not have 2 MAG character on your team with Squall. The fact that they can output 4 times the damage of a STR character while having an easier time to heal through Shell and maintaining buffs cause you want triple anyway just completly destroys the balance. There is also not a single boss that has a high enough SPR to make STR characters more viable. Not one. There's 2 bosses in the whole game that has the ability to alternate between immunity to magic and physical damage. One can be cheesed with Diablos and the other one can be killed before the magical ward with a single MAG character (or worst case scenario can be stalled).Yea, this is pretty much on point, unfortunately. Triple spamming magic is just too strong & easy of a strategy without harsh limitations on Triple or strong spell availability. As for Diablos, I urged Callisto to make all bosses immune to that because it's such a stupid oversight in what is by-and-large a pretty robust challenge mod, to be able to just sidestep entire boss battles like that. I believe at least Cerberus & the Iguions were susceptible to Diablos, probably others as well.
The balance between MAG and STR is so terrible that my Squall against end game bosses with 255 STR and 122 MAG was dealing more damage with a triple flare than with a physical attack .. which is completly stupid.
It causes many issues such as :Well, the first points indicate that you found some of the battles challenging, so the mod is performing as it should there. Good to hear.
- Some bosses have crazy high ATB (which is the case of Ifrit, supposed to be a tutorial boss, literally impossible to kill without abuse if you go straight there without grinding in Lionheart)
- Higher ATB speed in general leads to two problem. When single target damage is high you can be unlucky and the same character will be focused twice before you can leading to his death. There's nothing you can do to prevent that scenario and I suspect a general AI script was changed or implemented because bosses tends much more to focus a single character for several turns. When it's high damage AOE sometimes you'll just get wiped before you can act because that AoE will be used twice in 3 seconds.
- In the remastered version (unsure if it was that bad in the 2013 one) the battle menu is also in 15 FPS which is sluggish. So much that sometimes it skips inputs and leads to the wrong targeting. But the real issue is that "Wait" mode doesn't freeze ATB while targeting (was already the case in Vanilla) but since the menu lags you need time to properly target and with high ATB speed, bosses will often cut your turn to attack while you're targeting spells.
- Some scripts changes leads to frustating situation, not necesseraly hard but overall annoying such as Ultimate weapon fight. The fight isn't hard but tedious when you buff and the boss immediatly goes Dispelga -> Pillar (one chaacter die, fixed 9999 damage) -> Pillar (same) -> Pillar -> Dispelga. I had it happens a few times, you just waste time buffing / using full-life for no challenge at all.
Time passing while targeting is a major problem though which I've brought up before as well. Sometimes fights really are down to fractions of a second and you need to be a god at quickly moving the cursor. IIRC Callisto replied that it's a technical limitation and beyond his ability to fix, unfortunately, so the best we can do is pull up the "list view" of targets and use that instead of trying to target the character models.
Pillar of Light spam starts happening with Ultima after a certain amount of time has passed. It's been a while so I don't remember exactly but it may have been something like 2 full cycles of a specific script and then it devolves to spam, indicating your "time is up", as it were. Yea I thought it pretty lame as well, but then again it's a legit design choice to have it be somewhat time-limited like that. This is assuming it hasn't been changed significantly since I last experimented with the boss.
I also don't get the removal of a few endgame stuff.-Aura Stones: Once again, I advocated for having a limited quantity of them available in the game, and I still strongly believe they shouldn't be farmable.
Aura spell : There's still aura stone farming for the same result (except you can't triple cast it but it doesn't really matter to begin with)
Heroes / Team invicibility : still exists but is more convoluted to obtain, meaning if someone really want these he'll get them, just need more time
And all of that to add a new hyper broken spell called Renew that cast regen, protect and shell at the same time.
Like you reduce the sources of broken endgame stuff but add another one farmable in 5 minutes. You can literally get 30 Renews every minute or so stealing behemoths. The whole endgame was clearly balanced around Renew and 9999 HP since almost everything towards end of disc 3 and disc 4 has high ATB speed and requires protect + shell while still dishing 5k+ damage in some cases if you don't farm stat ups and devour (which shouldn't be mandatory, it should only ease fight, not be mandatory).
-Heroes/Holy Wars: What, you can farm these? No way, Callisto wouldn't do that. I was under the impression there's only 1 Holy War in the entire game. Maybe I shut their existence out of my mind. I never used them personally, though I think it's okay to have 1 in the game, for example against Omega or Ultimecia.
-Renew is a fine addition for endgame, however its availability is once again the issue, as with other high tier spells.
Well, the endgame should be balanced around optimal setups and buffs. It is a hard mode of a rebalance mod, after all. Devour was left in as an endgame option for people who enjoy maxing their builds. I of course objected to it, but was ultimately convinced that that too is core to the game's identity for a lot of players. Stat ups shouldn't be farmable - if they are, it's definitely a mistake. In any case these most certainly aren't mandatory - I've completed Lionheart mode as a LLG challenge without much difficulty.
Then comes Omega. Clearly wasn't tested properly. Every AoE hit for a few thousand. Then he has Megido Flame which was roughly 9k damage on characters level 100 with best junction possible in VIT / SPR and a DEF / SPR +30% in their weaker stat (and that ignores protect / shell). And then there's Terra break, a meteor like spell hitting many times random characters, each hit being 4k+ under shell protect. Literally impossible to survive with lvl 100 characters, Renew, best junction for SPR/ VIT and +30% in SPR/VIT. The whole team get wiped. Omega also has a high ATB speed, meaning often Megido Flame will result in a wipe because he'll do an AoE (often ultima) right before or after it.So yea the ultimate boss fight in the game should force you to use everything at your disposal, including the (hopefully) singular Holy War and whatnot, because if you won't use the strongest tools available to you here, then where exactly? And you call that bad design? Give me a break. Again, it's fine if you'd like to play it a certain way and not use X or Y, but that's a you problem, not a "balance" problem.
If you don't farm VIT/SPR up or don't devour mobs, you simply can't survive Omega unless you abuse invincibility or have a character dedicated to use Defend and spam Mega phoenix (which makes the fight ultra boring). This is bad design. Farming stas up should make fights easier, and shouldn't be mandatory. There is a convoluted way to survive by casting zombie but since you absolutely need renew, it means you'll degen + you'll have issue healing and considering his ATB you won't have time to remedy+ or triple esuna before the next AoE.
Regrettable to hear it's possible to farm stat-ups though, definitely should be removed for the hard mode at least. I didn't remember it being a thing.
I do have to confess that I didn't complete my last playthrough because of some of these issues, the biggest being multicasting always being the most efficient strategy, making gameplay repetitive, that and the fact that in all honesty I do still find Lionheart mode too easy. Last time I played I even used a custom no-experience patch Callisto gave me but in the long run it just doesn't feel right to try and intentionally make things harder. It also apparently made physical attackers even weaker by comparison due to how stats affect damage output, but since you had a similar issue, I imagine it doesn't matter as much as I thought. I remember Callisto talking about fixing some of this stuff, but it's been a long time. I do hope he returns to this someday, and maybe further tailors the hard mode to be a genuine challenge by removing some of the exploits and quirks that make it easy or repetitive.